Social Media for lead generation ﻿

How’re you expecting to generate leads on platforms where everyone’s posting about food… and dogs…and dogs eating food?

Here’s a guide to help you stand out from the crowd.

How to generate Social Media leads

Social Media leads convert at a 13% higher rate than leads on other media. But you need to do more than your average post in order to make a real difference. Experiment with different strategies, test out different kinds of posts and formats and watch the magic happen.

Strategies for generating social media leads

The most beautiful part of social media is the flexibility that it offers. There’re a million and one ways to engage with your audience. Don’t constrain yourself to the basic post that literally every one of FaceBook’s 2.4 billion monthly users is uploading (without even considering the users on all the other platforms).

Here’s a breakdown on some of the most effective steps you can take to leverage social media for lead generation:

Go beyond LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t the only place where your social content should live. Sure, it’s a great pool of opportunity, but make sure your content gets to explore the rest of the social media world. Experimenting with new platforms can get you a wider audience. Even though there may be a slight overlap, not everyone who follows you on other social media will be a part of your LinkedIn audience.

Switch up those CTAs

They’re not working out for you, you wouldn’t be here if they were. It’s time to move on and implement some new CTAs. Experiment a bit, have some fun and figure out what works best for you.

Here’s a quick rundown on how you can revamp your CTAs:

Viva La Revolution

Make your CTAs sound revolutionary. The world doesn’t want the same old stuff, and if they do, you don’t want to target them. After all, why would anyone satisfied with their current state want to do business with you?

Use CTAs that sound like you’re doing something radical, something visionary. People love something novel, here’s your chance to give it to them.

Let’s be Comedians

Would you rather click on something that bores you to sleep or something funny enough to get you falling out of your seat? I thought so too. Make them laugh, they’ll thank you for it.

My Precious

Like Gollum, we all want something valuable. Make the value clear in your CTA and they’ll line up to give you their information.

Run Forrest, Run!

If you give them a chance to casually stroll around, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. To get them to hurry up, you’ll need to create urgency. We humans love saving our energy, we’re not going to take action unless we have to. Make your audience feel like they have to take action right away. Use words like ‘Now’ to make them take action, instead of postponing it indefinitely.

Let The Games Begin

We all want some fun in our lives. And we definitely love prizes. Hosting competitions on social media is a great way of generating leads. Allow the would-be participants to compete only after they furnish their contact details. Now you’ve got yourself a readymade group of people who’re genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Make it better by offering a product or service of your own as the prize. There’s ample evidence suggesting that some of those who don’t win will actually purchase your product/ service to placate themselves.

Stay Active

When you keep your self active, you’re strengthening yourself. When you write in the active voice, you’re strengthening your copy. Sure, the passive voice can be appropriate in some places, but that lies to a greater extent in the world of literature. Creating social content that facilitates lead generation is a task much better done using the active voice.

FREE, FREE, FREE

Don’t you just LOVE free stuff? So does your audience. When you offer them a free trial, they’re more likely to trust your organization. When trust enters the equation, it blazes a path for sales to follow.

Software companies have experienced a 60% conversion rate after offering free trials. Free trials get your leads into the door; once they’re in, it’s fairly easy to convert them into customers, especially if you’re selling a high-quality product.

Big Brother’s Watchin’

Keep your eyes peeled at all times, never know what you may see. Through social listening and monitoring, you can observe the market. See what everyone is talking about with regard to your keywords and topics of interest and even about your competitors.

Imagine this scenario, someone’s talking about the problems they’re facing and since you’ve been listening, you can offer to solve their problem. Here’s another situation; your competitor’s customer is talking negatively about her experience with them, you can swoop in and pitch your product to her.

Without social listening and monitoring tools, you wouldn’t be able to do this at scale. Don’t miss out on these easy targets, start employing a social listening and monitoring tool today.

To Gate Or Not To Gate, That Is The Question

Creating gated content is the easiest way to generate leads. After all, the viewer has to enter her contact details in order to view the content. But complicating the process could very easily deter the viewer from trying to consume the content in the first place, significantly reducing engagement.

Here’s how you go around this.

Segregate your content into ‘Top of Funnel’ and ‘Bottom of Funnel’ content.

Top of Funnel Content

Customers at the top of the funnel are essentially searching for answers and solutions rather than specific brands. They’re curious, but not ready to make a purchase.

Content like blog posts and awareness stage videos work really well here. The point of such content is to reel the audience in and get them to start engaging with your content. Gating such content would be a horrible idea since they haven’t gotten a taste of your content yet and would not be inclined to make the effort to provide their details. If this content is gated, they may just ignore your content altogether and instead of gaining leads, you’ll lose engagement.

Bottom of Funnel Content

By the time they reach the bottom of the funnel, your potential customers are hooked. They know for a fact that your content brings value to them, and they may even be considering making a purchase.

Here’s where you could experiment with gating your content. Create high-value content in the form of seminars, E-Books, etc. and ask the viewers to provide the contact details before granting access to the content. You’re essentially making their contact information their ticket to consume that content. Now you have a list of leads who are highly interested in what you have to offer and should be easier to convert into customers.

So Emotional

Emotions drive us. Two in particular work better than the others; Fear and Greed. Greed’s pretty good on its own. Fear’s even better. But a marriage of greed and fear is content that can really cause the readers to take action.

Arousing these two emotions can cause a stir in the hearts and minds of your readers. And when you have both their hearts and their minds, selling becomes an easy task.

Make them fear missing out on your revolutionary product/ service. Show them how much they stand to benefit from using it. Take them on an emotional rollercoaster in your content, and they’ll be hooked. Generating social media leads becomes the easiest thing once you figure out how to thrill your audience with this emotional ride.

Don’t treat them the same

All social media are not built the same. It’s similar to TV channels. You go to different channels to consume different content, likewise, you go to different social media platforms to consume different types of content.

Just like you wouldn’t switch to HBO if you want to catch up on the news, you wouldn’t go to LinkedIn if you want to consume some lighthearted, amusing content.

Keep the audience’s objective in mind when it comes to different platforms and curate your content to cater to those objectives.

Make it scarce

People naturally want what’s hard to get. If something’s not easily available, it’s demand goes up exponentially. You can very easily create the illusion of scarcity by mentioning a limit within your CTA.

When you know that something’s going to be unavailable soon, you’re going to make the effort to purchase as much as you can, as soon as you can. When your customers know that registrations are going to close soon, they’ll register right then instead of putting it off to a later time.

Try something new

Push out of your comfort zone. You only grow when you’re uncomfortable. Experiment with different forms of content. If you’ve only been using still images, use gifs and videos. Do something new, there’s always scope for improvement.

Conclusion

Social media can be an invaluable source for lead generation. In fact, it has a lead-to-close rate that’s almost double that of outbound marketing. For better lead generation, supplement your social media efforts with a marketing automation tool. LeadMi crawls the internet, finding high quality leads for you to convert into customers. Try it out today.

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About Engati

Social Selling- you’ve heard about it. But you’re wondering, ‘Why on earth should I try selling my product on platforms that literally just have teenagers dancing to dubbed music?’ It’s time to answer that question.